Milan Kundera Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, People, Imagination

  "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book edited by George Plimpton, October 1, 1986.

• You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Imagination, Modern

  "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book editing by George Plimpton, Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), 1988.

• High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Children, Race

• Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

  Milan Kundera

  Beauty, Art, Matter

  "James Joyce, the Citizen and the Artist". Book by Charles Peake, 1977.

• Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Passion, Mean

• Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Strong, Passion

  "Nesnesitelna lehkost byti (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

• ...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Media, Opaque

• Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Logic, Source

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